Lost in The Eternal Now, reporters make One Big Mistake in writing about Donald Trump.
They call him unique.
There is nothing unique about Donald Trump. Yes, he is attempting to overthrow gains the American people won from tyranny over the course of 100 years.
But all those fights were against other Americans, and American governments. We have been here before. We have always been here.
Let’s not even talk about slavery or the Indian genocide. Let’s not even play Ragtime, the book, movie or musical where a black man is put down while a white immigrant rises.
Let’s start with that great liberal hero. Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson was a racist of the most violent kind. He was only “liberal” where it came to finance, and toward other Europeans AFTER WWI. But during that war German Americans, including my grandfather and great-grandfather, were constantly suspected of treason. Afterward, Prohibition was enacted in large part to divorce German beermakers, Irish whiskey merchants and Italian winemakers away from “100% Americanism.”
It was Wilson who led to the second rising of the KKK. It was Wilson who invaded Mexico and gave Central America its banana republics. Under the banner of “America First,” the Klan publicly murdered thousands of people, mostly black, mostly men, in the most brutal ways possible. They didn’t just hang them. They butchered them, tortured them, in public, while crowds of hundreds or even thousands of white men, women and children cheered.
Trump’s kleptocracy isn’t new, either. Again, just look at the 20th century. Warren G. Harding captured the term “America First” from the Democrats, using it in precisely the way Trump uses MAGA. His successor, Calvin Coolidge, made J. Edgar Hoover the arbiter of America’s criminal laws for the next half-century. Hypocrisy became policy.
As the Klan’s influence declined after 1924, when it failed to make Wilson’s son-in-law President, it was replaced by real Fascists. Real Nazis, not the play-pretend children Trump is turning out. They didn’t just rally in 1939, but throughout the 1930s, drawing tens of thousands to cheer Hitler and his entire ideology. Henry Ford was a Nazi sympathizer. FDR also had to fight like hell to re-arm America after the war began, in the face of opposition that included two future Presidents.
Let’s also never forget where Hitler’s ideas came from. His race laws were modeled on Jim Crow America. The eugenics concepts he campaigned on originated in America. The idea of “lebensraum,” of capturing eastern Europe and exterminating its people, was modeled on the story of the American West.
Some of this climaxed with World War II, but in other ways it was just getting started. Jim Crow still stood after the war. Lynchings still happened after the war. McCarthyism happened after the war. Bull Connor happened after the war. Nixon happened after the war.
Saint Ronald Reagan was a racist and we didn’t have to go through his old papers to learn it. His general election campaign opened with an all-white rally in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three Civil Rights workers had been murdered just 15 years before. There he made an impassioned defense of “state’s rights,” precisely the banner George Wallace fought under.
There’s not just a duality to the southern thing. There’s a duality to the American thing. A cross was burned into a lawn just a few miles from the home I grew up in, in Massapequa, Long Island, in the 1970s. l I don’t think my dad was unhappy about it. At the time, I wasn’t unhappy about it, either. It’s one of the great shames of my life that I wasn’t unhappy about it.
Much of this early history is covered by Sarah Churchwell in her book “Behold, America.” She contrasts the ideal of “the American Dream,” in all its constantly evolving meanings, with the ideals of “America First,” which is Trump’s banner. The dream of egalitarianism has been transformed, in our time, into unquestioning love of billionaires. The idea of isolationism has been repeatedly turned into a demand for tyranny.
All Trump did was rip the scab off a festering wound. We must now be the antibiotic. The lesser angels of our nature have always competed with our better ones. The idea that America is somehow different from other nations because of our Constitution, our equality, or our tolerance has been ripped away. We can now see ourselves, for the first time in my lifetime, as others see us.
But this is also a great opportunity. All the evils of our past have been loosed from Pandora’s Box. All those who support such evil have been exposed to public scrutiny. We know who our enemies are. We know who the fellow travelers are, and the sunshine patriots who will say nice things but never lift a finger to make things better. We know what America must do, how we must change, to reclaim what we once called the American soul.
We are fortunate in this time of crisis that the demands of “the money” now conform with those clamoring for dramatic political change. Human capital is the gating factor in a technological age. Trained, eager minds are what create economic growth, nothing else. Those companies driving the American economy, the Cloud Czars and their retinue, know this. They know that they can only win if America becomes what it had claimed to be before Trump, welcoming of change and willing to change its mind.
There are no longer any excuses. There is only the fierce urgency of now in an existential crisis. But, please, as you go about your business confronting evil, know its history. Know where it came from. Know that it’s not unique. Don’t get lost in the Eternal Now. “Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding.”
